Name: An Oral History of 'Stranger Things’ with The Duffer Brothers
Uploaded: 2025-12-04T16:55:18.000Z
Duration: 22 min 24 s
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The comparative

And we're the creators of stranger things.

Guys, I really think we should turn back.

I would say the most important part of making the show was casting, and specifically season one casting.

We knew if we didn't have the right kids, the show was going to collapse.

I think we had maybe two scripts written and we started casting.

So we started working on finding the cast really, really quickly.

The characters, the kids, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, were pretty.

They weren't nearly as interesting or three dimensional as they are now.

And that was because of the kids that we found.

So we were just looking for the best, most authentic kids.

You know, a lot of these kids, they just sound rehearsed.

A reference point for us, obviously, is the Goonies.

When we were kids and we saw that movie, it resonated with us so deeply because they sounded and spoke like we did with our friends.

So that's really what we were looking for.

Rather than finding a kid who perfectly matched the character that was written on the page.

And it was pretty clear right away that who was right for the role.

I think to me, it sort of defines one of the key traits of the show, which is that and something we wanted to do from the very beginning and like the movies that we grew up loving, which is it's about the ordinary and the extraordinary.

So you take something that everyone knows and everyone's familiar with, which is Christmas lights, and

then you imbue it with something magical.

That image right there defines what the show is about, both in terms of tone, tone and thematically.

So I think that might be one reason that it resonates also an amazing Winona Rider performance.

In terms of figuring out what we wanted our monster to be and to look like.

One is we wanted him to be played by an actor.

It ended up being played by an actor named Mark.

We wanted it to be old school and capture it all on camera.

There were a couple moments where we did have to rely on CG, but

I would say about 95% of it is done entirely practical.

So that kind of limits what you can do, but in a good way.

And the other thing is, we wanted this creature from a distance to look like a human.

So that's where the face opening came from, because we needed it from a distance with its face closed to look like a human.

So when Will sees it for the first time or really second time, when he's looking out his window and he sees it among the laundry, there's something very, very human about it.

So all of that led to, I guess, or contributed to the ultimate design, the Demogorgorian.

I think what we also wanted to do was just make it so that if we talk to our concept artists about it, which is if you're a child and you watch this show and you really like it, can you draw it?

That's how the sort of the petals came about.

And every year that when we are designing a new creature, we think back on that with cg.

Now you can make things as complex and quote, unquote, realistic as you want, but

there's something about the monsters that we grew up loving, that there's just a simplicity to it, a childlike simplicity to it.

So that's how we approach all of our monsters.

Young lady, you know, you have to pay for those.

We came up with a character of Eleven, we knew we wanted her to have a shaved head very early on.

And first of all, we knew she was going to be being experimented on.

I don't remember her ever not having a shaved head.

I think Fury Road came out around the same time.

And I do remember thinking Charlize looked particularly cool with a shaved head.

We showed that to Millie to make her feel comfortable in shaving her head.

Because we're like, look how cool Charlize looks.

I mean, it's not like we invented that idea.

I think that's been prevalent and certainly in some Steven King stories.

But, you know, we like the idea of grounding her abilities as much as possible.

So we like the idea that it was, you know, causing some pain in some way.

That's not something that comes easily to her.

So that's something that's been always important with us, to ground it, to ground as much as possible.

I don't remember where the ego idea came from.

I think it came more from we remembered movies of our childhood and youth.

Even something like E.T. where you've got E.T. loving his Reese's Pieces.

And so I think when, when we were thinking about 11, what would she like?

We were thinking about the products from, from our childhood and Eggos popped into our head and we, and

we love that idea of combining sort of a classic brand with this young human who hadn't really experienced life at all and certainly hadn't experienced the 80s or Eggos.

But we had no idea that Eggos would become that much of a thing.

We're just like, this is something the lesn could eat.

Whenever you're making the show, you never know what is gonna resonate with people or not.

Sometime in the breaking of season one, Netflix asked us for a document explaining all the.

They were just wanted to make sure we knew what was going on because there are a lot of strange things happening in the show, of course.

And so we wrote up this 20 some page document and it explained a lot of things about the show, including Eleven's powers and about the upside down.

But we told them we still want it to be a mystery, but

we're going to reveal it over the course of subsequent seasons.

So it's finally time to explain what it is.

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An Oral History of 'Stranger Things’ with The Duffer Brothers

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